Germany

Germany is both a distant battlefield and an immediate political danger in The Plot Against America. In Philip Roth's account, the country’s Nazi rule gives urgency to his father’s warnings about the fate of Jews in Europe and the risks of trusting Lindbergh’s claimed understanding with Adolf Hitler. The historical appendix widens that frame, setting the novel’s imagined American politics beside documented anti-Semitic propaganda and the Nazi government’s relationships with prominent Americans.

Germany as a Threat in the Roth Family's Debate

At a family dinner, Herman Roth argues with Lionel Bengelsdorf over the American president’s neutrality and his relationship with Hitler. Herman points to Germany’s conquest of Europe and war with the Soviet Union, and to the bombing of London, as evidence that the conflict is no distant or ordinary dispute. He warns that Hitler’s aims include the United States and that Jews are targeted wherever German forces advance. In his view, the Iceland understanding between Hitler and Lindbergh offers no dependable protection: Hitler has made agreements before and broken them.

Bengelsdorf answers from a sharply different political position. He says he has spoken with Lindbergh at the White House and argues that the president has relinquished earlier anti-Semitic misconceptions. He presents Lindbergh’s Office of American Absorption as the opposite of Germany’s exclusion of Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, emphasizing invitations to participate in national life rather than the removal of civil rights. The exchange makes Germany a standard against which both men judge the American government, but their conclusions diverge: Herman sees the president’s accommodation with Hitler as dangerous, while Bengelsdorf insists that American policy is fundamentally unlike Nazi rule.

The disagreement is also a family rupture in miniature. Herman’s alarm breaks through the deference he had shown Bengelsdorf, while Sandy’s reaction signals his growing distance from his father’s political outlook. Bess grips Herman’s hand after his speech, though Philip cannot tell whether she means to express pride or to quiet him. Germany’s threat thus enters the household not only as news from abroad, but as a test of whether the family can agree about what that news means.

The War in the East and the Jewish Stakes

By early 1942, Herman follows the war closely, especially the German campaign against the Soviet Union. The family has heard how Russian counterattacks broke the sieges of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad, but by March Germany has regrouped and is reinforcing for a spring offensive toward the Caucasus. Herman explains why a possible Soviet collapse would matter beyond military control: the Soviet Union’s resources could pass into German hands, its people could be forced to serve the Third Reich, and millions of Russian Jews could come under the control of an army equipped to carry out Hitler’s anti-Jewish program.

The danger is personal as well as political. Herman fears for members of Bess’s extended family, whose origins lie near Kiev, and sees the prospect of their persecution as bound up with the course of the war. Philip’s narration places this dread beside an uncomfortable contrast at home: while his father agonizes over the threatened Jews and the setbacks facing the Allies, Alvin appears indifferent to anyone’s suffering beyond his own. Germany’s advance therefore measures not just the scale of a military crisis, but the unequal ways people within the same family respond to it.

Propaganda, Political Connections, and Accommodation

The appendix traces an American channel for anti-Semitic ideas through Henry Ford. In 1920, the Dearborn Independent began publishing a series of articles about an alleged international Jewish conspiracy and serialized the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic. The newspaper’s circulation rose, subscriptions were pressed on Ford dealers, and the articles were collected in The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. This account shows anti-Semitic propaganda being produced and circulated in the United States rather than treating hostility to Jews as something confined to Germany.

Ford later retracted his attacks, discontinued the publications, and closed the paper. Yet the appendix also records his continuing political significance: in 1938, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler’s government. Charles A. Lindbergh received the same medal in Germany that October. When the United States approached war, Ford joined Lindbergh in supporting isolationism and the America First Committee. These details place the fictional Iceland understanding within a wider pattern of American figures expressing sympathy for, or accepting honors from, Nazi Germany even as the novel’s characters dispute what such ties signify.

Germany in the Book's Historical Frame

The appendix identifies Joseph Goebbels as an early Nazi Party member who became Hitler’s propaganda minister in 1933, overseeing the press, radio, movies, and theater as well as public spectacles. It describes him as one of Hitler’s most devoted and brutal associates. As Germany was destroyed and Soviet forces entered Berlin in April 1945, Goebbels and his wife killed their six young children and died by suicide. The entry on Hermann Göring likewise links the Nazi state to the creation of its secret police and air force, and records his conviction for war crimes and suicide shortly before execution.

These compact historical entries give the novel’s political argument a frame extending beyond the Roths’ household and the imagined presidency. Germany signifies the machinery of persecution and propaganda that Herman fears will reach Jews in the Soviet Union and, eventually, America. At the same time, the book’s account of Ford, Lindbergh, and American isolationism insists that the threat cannot be understood as foreign alone: the country’s influence and the American choices made in response to it are part of the same political story.